Memorable Pants

When I was home this past weekend my mom, sister and I were going through a box of our old t-shirts from when we were growing up, but there was also a very memorable pair of pants in the box.  I wore these in 8th grade and I was curious to see if I could still get in them.  I was able to get them on, but there was no way they were going to zip and button!  Kind of a bummer, but that was over 10 years ago, so I guess I can't be too disappointed.

Look at those flares!  Much wider than the skinny jeans I wear these days.

So what's so memorable about these pants?  Well, it has to do with that big stitch...

When I was 14,  I was working at a summer camp, and one weekend after the campers had all left a bunch of us counselors were riding the dirt bikes.  I don't know exactly how it happened, but somehow I wrecked.  I guess I was knocked unconscious as soon as I hit the ground, and I stayed unconscious the whole time it took someone to run up to the office, get the nurse, and come back down.  I remember waking up in the field, with all of the counselors and the camp nurse all huddled around me.  She told me I'd had an accident and started asking me several questions.  I knew the answers to the first few, but then I couldn't answer what year it was, who the president was, or the names of some of the other counselors.  And I don't remember a lot of what happened after that.  I don't remember the ambulance getting there, or being put on the backboard and having a neck brace put on, or having my forehead taped to the backboard.  I don't remember being put in the ambulance and I don't remember arriving at the hospital.  So what do I remember?  I remember a moment in the ambulance when I heard the EMTs say, "This might be more serious than we thought, let's turn on the sirens."  I remember the big CT scan machine.  I remember having ants in my hair because I was laying in the field for so long that they started crawling on me.  I remember that when my family finally got to the hospital and my mom asked me how I was feeling I said, "My butt hurts!  I'm tired of lying here!"  And I remember that when the EMT's got to me and started cutting my pants (because my knee had gotten burned from the muffler of the bike), I kept yelling at them to stop because those were my favorite pants.  I'd been unconscious, had a concussion, short-term memory loss, a second degree burn, a busted chin, and a black eye, and there I was concerned about my pants!  Priorities, ya know?

Thankfully though, I really was fine.  I walked (somewhat unsteadily) out of the hospital and never had any long term problems from the accident.  The only side-effect was that for the few hours after I left the hospital my memory seemed to reset every 10 minutes or so.  On the ride home I told the same story over and over and over again, for over an hour!  My poor family.

So, back to the pants...My mom stitched the pants back up and I wore them around some that summer and when I went back for another week of camp at the end of the summer, but needless to say didn't wear them back to school that fall.

I remember this crazy incident every time I see the scar on my knee, but putting on squeezing into the jeans was another story!